So I disconnected the shelf and used a piece of software that writes 3 patterns then verifies as per NSA/Dod requirements.

Then I reconnected the drives so I could reconfigure them but all the drives now will not come on line they all have red lights on. But they were working fine before. If I copy some of the data from another working drive back onto one of these drives it comes back on green and ready.

My questions is do these drives have some type of ID data that I erased when I wiped the drive? Or is there a processes I have to perform to get the drive seen by the head before it will show as ready?

Thanks for the input Cris. I know about the medata drives but we were having problems with the add on trays.

Whenever we sanitized the drives to NIST spec which is writing 3 patterns and then doing a pass of verify with a software that was designed of this purpose, we found that they would not be sized and were marked as bad by the HDS System software. Also the drives all had only red front led displayed. As you can imagine it was upsetting because as well as sanitizing the drives we had purchased them for resale.

However we did find that the fist 64 blocks on the drive held drive id info that must be there in order for the HDS system to recognize the drive. Our solution was to copy the first 64 blocks to a buffer then after the drives were wiped we copied the 64 blocks back to the drive and it worked fine.

Hope this helps someone else. These drives are still too expensive to destroy physically in concern for any PII data that may have been left behind.